So I set up my own "O'Neill's Updated" project to convert my copy of the collection into a form that's more usable. An important emphasis is on the various portable gadgets that people are using today in many of the teaching "sessions". I've been involved in some of these myself, especially with the Boston area's Scottish music crowd, which has for some time had a Slow Scottish Session that has converted entirely to electronic gdgets, mostly the various tablets and "phones" that have become so common.
A basic problem was that the tunes were organized mostly by number, with no titles in the file names. This made it difficult to even find a tune. My "Tune Finder" didn't help much, as the O'Neill's tunes were mostly buried in a pile of transcriptions, by various people, with no easy and consistent way to select just the O'Neill's version. My first step was to write a small script that duplicated my copy of O'Neill's 1850, using the tunes' titles as the file names. (There are a few cases of different tunes with the same title, and the tunes' numbers have been appended to the title, to make the file names different.
The main concern is the small screens, with a lot of variety in the shapes. I've saved a number of phone models, all with android, but with different height-to-width ratios, and from several manufacturers. I also have a couple of models of iPads. which have their own variety of shapes and capabilities. There is a lot of software-based variety in how they display things, too. One approach I've found useful is to have my copies of the music all in ABC form, which can be easily formatted on-the-fly to a variety of images in different formats, with different staff widths and note sizes. I also have several real (i.e., programmable) computers available with different-sized displays, and their windows can be rapidly changed to different heights and widths for testing.
One basic approach I've started with for most tunes is to use file names of the form Tune_Title_info-K-B-s.abc, where the fields are:
O'Neill used the "fermata" sign in both its original Italian meaning (stop, halt, end, closed) to mark the place that a tune should end, but also it's modern meaning of holding a note longer than the written time length. One problem that shows up in a lot of ABC formatting softwaye is that the symbol is often partly "off screen" and partly invisible because the computer doesn't display things positioned to the right of a window or screen's right edge. This has been partly fixed by adding a "y", which produces a small space at that point. It may also be positioned at the last note, which the O'Neills used sometimes. Sometimes, especially in condensed versions of tunes, the word "fine" is used instead, This is done mostly when the last phrase of the tune is identical to the first "A" phrase, and the latter is replaced by "D.C.". The "fine" makes it stand out as something added by the transcriber or editor, since the O'Neills didn't use it (but wrote out the full A part again at the end).
As the "1001" (Dance Music of Ireland) collection was incorporated here, a lot of tunes were found in both books. Sometimes these "duplicates" are identical, but usually they're somewhat different. There are many published as hornpipes in one collection, and as reels in the other. To help distinguish them, the tunes' numbers have been appended after the title (and before the bar count) in the file names. So far, no such duplicates have been found to have the same number in both collections. With time, I've found that it's useful to include the tune's number in the file name, immediately after the initial "Tune_Title" part.
One example of how complex the file naming can be is The Bold Deserter. There are two tunes in the collection with this title, tunes 291 and 1791. Usually a title separated like this means it's the title for two different tunes, but a quick look at both shows that they really are variants of the same basic tune. The O'Neills may not have realized this, or thought they were different enough to be treated as different tunes. Tune 291 is a simple version, which is easily sung or played as a march; 1791 has many more notes, enough to qualify as a reel for dancing. I decided to "reclassify" them by including "1st" and "2nd" in their file names, as the O'Neills did with a lot of tunes that are presented in multiple "Settings". The file names also have their index numbers, 192 and 1791, since they're not adjacent in the book. They also both qualify for compacting by labelling the parts and using a "P: Play ..." line, so their identical sections can be shown only once (for small screens, etc.).
There are a few tunes that were published in a rather high register. One example is tune 336, Catherine Tyrrell, whose 1st setting is in D, and ranges from the A on the staff to the high e' above the staff (4th position). I've included a version an octave lower, putting it all in 1st position, and in a much "fuller" part of a fiddle's range. Use the one you're most comfortable with. The 2nd setting of this tune is in G, which is more accessible to many musicians and instruments - but not all voices.
This does remind me that some of the tunes are regularly played in 2 or more different keys. I've included the alternate key(s) in a few tunes, and may do so with more tunes as the project continues.